A Hero Who Didn't Save Himself

"We were pretty much ambushed by a lot of insurgents on the second floor of the house," recalls Kraft, who is now a police officer in Fresno, Calif. He also was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions that day.

"I was scared," Workman says, laughing. "I really was. . . . When you get caught in a situation like that, it's a real man check. For two seconds, you have to look in that invisible mirror that's not there and look at yourself and question yourself as a man. And say, 'Okay, I'm a corporal in the Marine Corps and I have guys that are looking up to me for leadership. What am I going to do?' . . . So I grabbed everybody in the house and we come running."

Gun smoke rose from the windows of the house across the street. Workman ordered several men to guard the outside and then led the rest inside, where a lieutenant informed them that Marines were trapped on the second floor.

"The lieutenant looks at me and says, 'We gotta get in there.' I said, 'Okay, I'll follow you.' " He laughs. They then formed a line called a "stack" at the foot of the stairway.

"The lieutenant gets out of the way. Now, I'm the front man. I don't want to be." He laughs again. "In the citation, it says that Workman went in first every time. I'll be honest: It wasn't planned that way. . . . The lieutenant says, 'On three we're gonna go.' One, two, three. Bam! He kicks me and I go running up the stairs."

As he ran, machine-gun bullets buzzed past him, but he made it to the safety of the landing, protected from insurgent fire by a thick wall. But he was alone. Nobody had followed him.

"I remember him going up the staircase," says Kraft, who had managed to escape from the second floor after the ambush. There was a lot of confusion and the second guy in the stack sort of hesitated and that kept the rest of the stack back."

"So these guys are downstairs yelling at me, 'Get back down here.' And I'm like, 'You get up here.' I'm cussing at 'em," Workman says, smiling. "But it was a lieutenant, so I pretty much have to go down. I closed my eyes and did a Superman dive down the stairs."

The fall knocked the wind out of him. His buddies stood him back up.

They formed another stack with Workman again in front. He took off. This time, everybody followed and they reached the landing safely. They crept up another set of stairs toward the second floor. Workman had almost reached the top when a yellow grenade bounced into view.

"This thing went off and it felt like somebody hit me in the leg with a baseball bat," he says. "I look back and guys were laying down, knocked over. And I go, 'Is everybody good?' . . . Pretty much everybody got hit with shrapnel but we were all able to fight."

They climbed the stairs and fired at the insurgents, who were barricaded in a bedroom. After an intense firefight, the Marines ran low on ammunition and retreated outside to reload.